transcript

Let me tell you a story. 

Let me tell you the story of the houses I make. 

Let me tell you how these houses can shelter story. 

Let me tell you how stories seek a shelter. 

And let me tell you how stories are part of the invisible world. 

But first, let me tell you about my maternal grandfather. He was a woods worker, tall, strapping in his day, before his encounter with stomach cancer at the age of 50. He kept his height but was whittled thin for the rest of his 33 years on earth. He could jig squid, pick berries, and cook Sunday dinner like no-one else. He was whip-smart and didn’t need a calculator to build a house or to count exact change before a cashier could on their machine. He grew pumpkins and a lush kitchen garden — no mean feat among the rocks and north-easters of rural Newfoundland — and raised eight children alongside my grandmother. He also couldn’t read. But he knew more stories than I am capable of ever telling. I grew up next door to him and heard stories of ghosts, fairies, the Other folk, weather lights, and those who could cut two cords of wood in a day, or manoeuvre a boat around the most silent of rocks. 

From him, I learned that stories have a life of their own. In their circulation, they propel themselves forward from mouth to ear, coming to settle somewhere between heart and mind, braiding themselves among all the other stories we have taken in. Stories are keen to hop from teller to listener, and will make this jump if only we clear the space for them.

The other thing I need to tell you is that one of my earliest memories is of my father building our house. He let me climb the ladder up with him before the roof was on, and I’ve always kept the startling image of the joists spanning to the peak, looking down into the empty, unfinished house below. 

As an artist, a maker, I make houses, a process of translating a story to material form. My aim is often to create a condition — if I build this space, what will happen inside it? What sort of stories does the house elicit? 

[nostos]  

I built these three houses out of pine and spent a summer carefully attaching the delicate paper of sewing patterns together to form their walls. Together, they are called nostos: a home against the skin. ‘Nostos’ means to return home; a homecoming, or homeward journey; especially alluding to the myth of Odysseus. This nostos, these houses, also consider textiles as the first house of the body and what either can offer us in terms of protection. Embedded in these houses are also the stories of labour — the traditionally female labour of sewing and stitching, of keeping loved ones warm, every stitch a syllable. The houses also index the traditional male labour of house-building — using hammers instead of needles, nails instead of thread. Each a way of telling, of taking care, of keeping warm, of paying attention. 

By keeping these stories in my heart and mind and in my hands, something of these long lines of labour is present in these structures. And something about that echo of repetition, of labour, calls for quiet. By re-enacting this slow form of making, the stories can rise to the surface, if you are listening. 

[clew] 

This trio of houses in the woods is called clew. A clew can be many things — the lower corner of a sail; the action of either furling or unfurling this same sail. It can also signify the action of rolling something into a ball, or a ball of thread itself, particularly in reference to the Greek myth of Ariadne, Theseus, and the labyrinth. In this story, Ariadne is a princess living on Crete, who looks after a labyrinth in which a minotaur lives at the centre. Human sacrifices are routinely made to the minotaur, and one year, the sacrificial party includes Theseus, the future king and founder of Athens, who vows to kill the minotaur. Ariadne falls in love with Theseus, and unbeknownst to her father, the king of Crete, she gives Theseus a sword to kill the half-man/half-bull and a ball of thread so he can find his way out of the labyrinth and back to her. 

These houses in the woods are bound to one another by a single length of red thread that winds its way through each of them, and is anchored to the mast — a living tree — fitted with a white sail. This mythical story and the simpler story underneath about finding your way home, is made material in this instance. The red thread provides bearings back home to the houses even while the white sail beckons toward the water at the same time. 

These house require the gift of duration from the visitor, or if you like, the listener. It requires time to make your way among the houses, being careful of the red thread white attempting to follow it, keeping one eye on the sail, blowing in the breeze. It requires time to let the story surface.

[tenderhouse] 

This next house is called tenderhouse, recently completed and still close to the heart. tenderhouse is a house of words. On this small structure, nearly 200 fabric knots spell out an excerpt in Braille from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “the houses have all gone under the sea / the dancers have all gone under the hill.” 

Two meanings of the word “tender” are: 1) sensitive to touch or palpation and 2) an offer or proposal made for acceptance. A visitor in this house can run their hands over the fabric knots, which are sensitive to touch and palpation, and let reading become an embodied, multi-sensory act. The scale of the Braille is expanded from the width of a fingertip to the width of a splayed hand, each letter a handful of tenderness. All this cloth is second-hand and domestic — sheets, pillowcases, curtains, cheesecloth, aprons. The fabric of bedrooms and kitchens. The fabric of repetition, of folding, of wringing, of tying, of being close to the skin. Traditionally, the fabric of female bodies. Each piece preserves a gesture of touch within it, which I continued while tying repetitive knots throughout the house. This gesture continues further through touch from the splayed hands of visitors. The tails of these knots wave in the wind outside, an instance of language made tactile, animate. 

This house creates a small space — 6 x 6’, inadvertently the dimensions of our physical distancing. In a narrative medicine context — a method that underpins my practice — this house’s small space creates a place where listening and witness can emerge. 

***

Narrative medicine holds that attention, representation, and affiliation can allow us to absorb the stories of others and be moved to action by them. tenderhouse embodies these principles by creating a place to meet in proximity, a place to sit with ambiguity, and let stories slowly unfold around us.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas speaks of being “with and for the Other” in an ethics of listening. An ethics of listening acknowledges that stories need to be told, that they do have a life of their own, and are searching for a listener. Sociologist Arthur Frank strengthens this thread by adding that “one of our most difficult duties as human beings is to listen to the voices of those who suffer […] but in listening for the Other, we also listen for ourselves. The moment of witness in the story crystallizes a mutuality of need, where each is for the other.” 

This form of deep embodied listening, of complete attendance, can manifest in material form. Handling a material, turning something over in your hands, can give you an insight into what its capacities are, how it is willing to be transformed, what stories it holds of its own making. This kind of listening can be woven through every layer of a work — an attendance to the raw material; an attendance to the process of stitching, nailing, suturing materials together; an attendance to what sort of condition or atmosphere this work will create when it is out of your hands. If the listening is embedded in every layer, then the structure will resonate with the attention of its making, and in turn, allow that to permeate others who experience it.

The labour and repetition intrinsic to the building and sewing process is mirrored in the labour and repetition of showing up to listen for one another. One nail, one stitch after another, the syllables cohere into a story. Saying “let me tell you a story” is a way of asking for time, for the attendance of the other, for the duration to hold you both while the story unfolds around you. One stitch, one syllable at a time, two things formerly separate can be made into one whole.